


to rid you from my bones

by wenandwhere



Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Happy Ending, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, New Relationship, Occult, Rope Bondage, Self-harm if you squint, Sickfic, also a lot of tenderness??, bad bondage practices, bones like in your body not the show, scrimshaw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-04 00:14:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21188342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wenandwhere/pseuds/wenandwhere
Summary: "I do think we need a sexy skeleton."---He’s walking a familiar tightrope, trying not to come on too strong while also trying not to overcompensate and withhold affection. He’s fallen off this rope on either side enough to feel shaky-steady, but so far Brian’s really got him listing dangerously toward saying some accidental-creepy shit about how he wants to hold him so tightly that he can reach under his skin. You know,romance.---"Why do plant have bone in it?"





	to rid you from my bones

**Author's Note:**

> Please be mindful of the tags. This is an odd one.
> 
> Title from an out of context line from "The Engine Driver" by The Decemberists.
> 
> Thank you fishcola for beta reading and helping me claw a plot out of the ether when I came to him with just the barest bones of a concept.

The ghost tour is as kitschy as can be expected. Their tour guide’s wearing a top hat and cape, so Pat knew what he was getting into from very early on. But then again, Simone and Jenna are wearing dramatic veiled hats themselves. So maybe it’s just him and Brian who dropped the ball on hats here.

This isn’t normally how Pat would like to spend a Friday evening, but Jenna’d picked a winning strategy when she’d invited Brian in on her Groupon tickets. Things were still new enough between the two of them that Pat couldn’t easily resist Brian’s forced-causal, _“I mean if you want to, but you don’t have to go.”_

It’s interesting at least, even if it’s all pretty fake. They’ve gotta hire these people seasonally and give them a script to memorize, right? Probably get some acting school kids looking to pad their resumes and really ham it up.

He doesn’t let his skepticism ruin the fun, though. It’s a nice October night and Brian keeps bumping his shoulder and smirking at him and pulling Pat’s hand into the pocket of his coat. By the fourth time their guide says the word _allegedly_, they’re both making eye contact and trying to hold their laughter in.

Brian’s definitely a little more into it, but Pat’s happy to be along for the ride.

For him, “the ride” seems to mean taking dramatic group shots of everyone else gazing horrified into the middle distance. Jenna takes one of him and Simone as well for good measure.

Brian takes one with him at the next historical building they stop at, instructing, “Okay now look at your hands like you’re thinking, ‘_What have I done?_’” Somehow, he manages to frame it perfectly even without looking at the camera.

“Can you please wait until you’re home to jump each others’ bones?” Simone says with mock-exasperation as she waits impatiently for them to close the growing gap between themselves and their tour group. Brian laughs and apologizes, jumping forward to meet her while Pat indulges her with a roll of his eyes and a few long strides, his cheeks reddening while he smiles to himself.

He’s walking a familiar tightrope, trying not to come on too strong while also trying not to overcompensate and withhold affection. He’s fallen off this rope on either side enough to feel shaky-steady, but so far Brian’s really got him listing dangerously toward saying some accidental-creepy shit about how he wants to hold him so tightly that he can reach under his skin. You know, _romance_.

They haven’t been together very long—coming up on two months, but who’s counting? (Pat’s counting)—so they’re still in the thick of _going out on dates_ and learning what each other is like in different contexts. Pat’s yet to pick a date that Brian hasn’t sucked the marrow from and he finds that even when he’s unsure about Brian’s plans, he ends up having a great time.

The guide is going on dramatically about how this is _allegedly_ the very home of some infamous occultist, but it’s very difficult to pay attention to which of his victims is _allegedly_ said to still haunt this space when Pat is so thoroughly distracted by how lush the garden is.

“Do you think this guy was just really into plants?” Pat murmurs to Simone. “And people used to find that creepy?”

“Yeah, it’d make sense if some were poison… but they would’ve mentioned that, right?”

“He said that _allegedly_ some victims were buried in the garden,” Jenna chimes in, “but obviously they’d know if that was true.”

Pat turns to get Brian’s take on the situation and sees that he’s wandered over near a small pond, leaning in to investigate a dark plant growing past a thick wall of smaller green ones near the water’s edge.

He loses himself for a moment, admiring the line of Brian’s long neck as he cranes forward to smell a tall flowering stalk off the burgundy growth. It’s endearing, the way Brian closes his eyes to smell or taste or hear more deeply, the way he’s doing that right now while he reaches out to tilt the plant toward himself.

Pat realizes how On Main he is with his ogling and starts to feel his face heat up when the moment’s broken by Brian hissing a sharp _ow!_ and shaking his right hand out several times.

He meets Pat’s eyes, sees the questioning quirk of his brow, and scrunches his nose up in guilt while he says, “I guess that one has a prickly stem.”

“Is it stinging?” Jenna asks.

“Nah, just bit me.” Brian jests and shows off his thorn-stung hand, though he’s still flexing his fingers.

Pat’s not on the up and up with his botanical identification skills, but it doesn’t look like any plant he’s seen before. Maybe it’s just the lighting under this cloudy October night. Maybe this tour’s just gotten to him. Maybe everyone thought the guy who lived here was an occultist because he grew some weird shit.

“You ‘kay?” He asks Brian when they’re filing out to go to the next stop. He reaches down to take Brian’s hand, but Brian flinches and drops back a step to walk around the other side of Pat, offering his uninjured hand.

“It’s just a scratch, Pat Gill,” Brian says breezily, smiling up at him like he finds Pat’s concern quaint. “Don’t worry about me. I can handle it.”

It’s Monday before they see each other again, since Brian was busy doing things with Laura and Jonah, and Pat had some side projects to work on as well. They text throughout the weekend, but it’s still a relief to see Brian. There’s this weird reassured feeling of, _oh, good, you still exist_ that Pat hadn’t expected. They’re taking it slow, though, so all he actually says when Brian walks in is, “G’morning.”

Brian nods with a small smile and murmurs something that’s _probably_ a return greeting, but he looks… well, he looks fucking _beat_. He probably just didn’t get enough sleep, maybe got too wrapped up in a project. That happens sometimes.

Pat shrugs it off. He’s not too far into his coffee yet, either, so he _gets it_.

“Late night?” Pat asks later on, casually swinging by Brian’s desk and setting down a bagel sandwich for him at lunch.

It takes a moment for Brian to blink some focus back into his eyes and he snaps back into reality, chuckling and nodding and smiling back at Pat. “Yeah, yeah. Trouble sleeping.”

“You working on more music with Jonah?”

“Mm, yeah. Over the weekend. I think I’m getting sick, though.”

“Oh.” Pat steps back instinctively, then feels awkward about it but doesn’t want to lampshade it by moving forward again. “You should take a sick day if you need it. We uh… we can reschedule lunch tomorrow, or whatever.”

“No!” Brian says, quicker and more alert than he’s been so far today. “No, I’m… It’s okay. I just had some nightmares. I’ll get some good sleep tonight, don’t worry. I’m not letting you off the hook that easy when it’s my turn to pick.”

“Okay,” Pat says, smiling and feeling reassured. “Take it easy.”

Brian’s out sick the following day, and he looks somehow _worse_ when he returns the day after that.

_It’s probably just the sweatshirt_, Pat reasons. No need to hover around the guy just because he’s got a cold. They’d texted a little bit, but he mostly tried to leave Brian alone and let him rest. 

Still… he pushes himself to finish what he’s working on a little earlier and messages Simone to ask about her preferred bone broth source and studiously ignores how easily she connects the dots. He buys her silence for a cup of broth.

Twenty minutes later he’s back and clearing his throat conspicuously, standing behind Brian and holding out a large cup of chicken broth.

Once again, it takes Brian a moment to bring himself back to the present. When the far-off look leaves his eyes and he takes the cup from Pat, holding it between two hands and staring up in confusion, Pat elaborates, “You can still pick lunch if you want, or take a raincheck, but I thought you might want something to warm yourself up en route.”

Brian looks down at the cup again and nods, then takes a sip.

“Are you feeling okay?” Pat asks, voice dropping quietly in measured concern. “Did you have trouble sleeping still?”

It’s impossible to decipher exactly what kind of feeling Brian’s trying to convey. It’s like he’s trying to make a cartoonishly uncomfortable expression with his mouth in a wavy line. He glances side to side, then says, “Can we go somewhere?”

Immediately alarmed, Pat stands up straighter and says, “Yeah, of course. Anywhere, yeah.”

He assumes Brian means somewhere _outside_, but instead of heading toward the elevator Brian walks down the hall and ducks into one of the private phone rooms.

There’s a moment of panic that hits Pat while he’s following, an internal dialogue that goes: _He’s going to break up with you_ and, _This isn’t about you, don’t be such a narcissist_ and, _You haven’t even been together that long it’s not a big deal if he’s figured out he doesn’t want this_ and, _You came on too strong_ and, _He’s just having nightmares, just listen to him_.

So Pat hopes he’s got a neutral expression on his face, though his heart sinks. He shuts the door behind them and takes a seat on the opposite end of the sofa from Brian, who’s curled up and fussing with the cuff of his sweatshirt.

The stretching silence does nothing to ease Pat’s concern. “Do you… need to make a phone call?” He asks, hoping to lighten the mood a bit if not get the ball rolling.

“That’d be easier,” Brian says, relenting with an expression to sad to be quite a smirk.

Pat grits his teeth and holds eye contact, gets his phone out, and tips it up to enunciate directly into the microphone, “Siri, call Brian Gilbert.”

Brian’s phone buzzes loud several times before he gets it out to answer, “Hello?”

“Hey, Brian,” Pat says, forced. “How’ve you been?”

“Oh, Pat,” he says, “I’m actually at work right now.”

Pat rolls his eyes and nudges Brian’s leg with the toe of his boot.

“I’ve been… you know, not great,” Brian tries again. “My—my boyfriend left my middle name off my contact info in his phone?”

It seems like Pat’s responding laugh settles Brian a little, at least. “Oh yeah, what an dick,” Pat says, “you want me to go kick his ass?”

“Nah,” Brian says with a small smile, “I like him with a regular ass. And a cute face.”

Seconds pass before Pat remembered there was a reason for this bit. “What’s wrong, Bri?” He asks, softly, lowering his phone just enough that he can pick it back up again if Brian wants to keep this going.

“I…” Brian chews too hard on his lower lip, hangs up the phone and focuses all his fingers on wringing the cuff of his sleeve too tight. “I don’t know… Something’s _wrong_, Pat.”

It’s unexpected, the way Brian jerks back as though scalded when Pat reaches out to touch his hands in an attempted gesture of comfort.

Before Pat has a chance to formulate a question, the answers Brian has begin to tumble from his lips.

“I keep having these dreams—they’re nightmares! But I can’t... I can’t remember them—they’re awful, though, Pat. It feels like—like I’m not forgetting them because they’re _dreams_, but… but because they’re things I can’t comprehend. And I… my...” He’s breathing hard now, not tearing up but perhaps on his way to hyperventilating. “I went to the doctor, yesterday. I kept waiting for it to go away, but they’re—I… I have these bruises. On my arm. But they’re spreading, Pat, I swear! I’m not crazy, I—“

He stops short when Pat furrows his brow and makes as if to reach for his sleeve. Brian shakes his head fiercely and hugs his arm tight to his chest. Pat withdraws entirely, not wanting to push Brian further toward burrowing into the corner of the couch.

“I’m thinking of telling Tara we’re not feeling well,” Pat says, trying not to sound _too_ cautious although he feels like he’s dealing with a spooked horse. “Does that sound alright to you? I can take you home, or you can come to mine, or I can just fuck off and leave you alone. Whatever you want.”

Brian heaves a shuddering sigh. “Okay. Yeah. Yours.” When Pat nods and stands, he adds, “Please.”

Pat nods again, then hands Brian his cup of bone broth once more and walks with calm purpose to Tara’s office.

It’s no trouble explaining the situation to her. With how previous years have gone, she’s plenty happy to nip impending office plagues in the bud, and Pat’s always been good about just taking as long as he needs, even if he _is_ bending the truth a bit this time.

Plus, she’s seen Brian the last couple days, and that’s all the convincing anyone should need.

They take the subway back to Pat’s and he tries not to notice how Brian seems to be consciously keeping Pat to his left. He just stays calm and quiet and hopes that doing so will lead Brian to mirroring his relaxed appearance.

As long as Brian can’t feel how tense he is, he can keep the illusion up. As long as he has _finding out what the hell is going on_ dangling in front of him, he can not freak out on the way home.

Brian follows him as if in a trance through the station and down the street and up the stairs and into Pat’s room until he sits himself on Pat’s bed and slumps over.

Pat looks at him a moment, then goes and gets a glass of water for him, passing it off silently and then moving his camera and light further away to give them some breathing room. He sits beside Brian, mindfully settling down to the left of him.

“You went to the doctor?” Pat prompts, softly.

“Yeah,” Brian says, and it sounds raspy and dry even though he’s drained half the glass of water. “I… need you to trust me, please.”

“Of course I trust you,” Pat says immediately, whipping his head up to look Brian in the eye.

With a silent solemn nod, Brian unzips and shrugs off his sweatshirt. He’s got an inconvenient long sleeve button-down under it, _of course_, so Pat just politely taps his index finger on his knee to keep from reaching out to help Brian’s shaking fingers working their way down.

He peels the shirt off his left arm, and then right, and there’s no attempt at any kind of sensual reveal unlike all the other times Pat’s seen Brian undress. All there is is Brian in his white undershirt and the matter-of-fact, clinical reveal of an unnatural bruise twining from the meat of Brian’s thumb up to the crook of his elbow.

To his credit, Pat doesn’t reach out this time. Instead, he waits until Brian turns and offers his arm out for inspection and tries to ignore the way even his delicate feather-light touches make Brian flinch.

The path of the mottled plum-purple bruise is unlike any Pat’s seen before. Which is to say, it _has_ a path. It moves, twining and jagged, like a vine climbing a trellis going up the underside and around the edge of Brian’s arm. And it’s so _narrow_, so localized to a trail unlike any other bruise Pat has had or seen.

“What’s this from?” Pat asks, daring to peel his eyes away to look up at Brian’s face, but Brian’s staring down at his own arm too.

“I went to the doctor,” Brian repeats, quiet, “just to get it checked out. I went to a MinuteClinic down the street, but they told me—they said it’s fine, just get rest. Come back if it gets worse. Ice it. So I went… Pat, I _know_ they were wrong, I went to the ER and waited hours. And when they finally saw me, it was only for friggin _minutes_. And I still… they just said the same things. Asked if I was in danger. Nothing wrong, just bruises. I tried—they wouldn’t x-ray me or anything. All my vitals were normal, nothing feels… it just feels like a normal bruise, y’know?”

“So,” Pat says, trying to follow, “they didn’t think it was anything. What do you think it is?”

Brian just stares for a moment, and breathes deep a few times. “Something feels _wrong_, Pat. Like… like how ‘_a feeling of impending doom_’ is a symptom for some things? And it’s _growing_, I swear, I woke up after we went on the tour on Friday and it was just here,” he points to the heel of his palm, “and then the next morning it was longer, and the next,” he trails off, tracing the path of the bruise down his arm.

“Did you maybe lean against some weird gate?” Pat suggests, struggling to find a way to be helpful. It would explain the fine, precise lines even if it wouldn’t explain how hard Brian would have needed to have pressed into any stationary object. He doesn’t have it down to a science yet, but he has at least a rudimentary understanding of the thresholds of Brian’s body.

Brian shakes his head fiercely, fluffy hair whipping around in an audible blur. “It’s not like that. I… it’s _growing_ Pat, literally. And the nightmares, I don’t—I think—,” he stops himself short and flexes his fingers nimbly, reaching out for something to busy them with. Pat takes his hands and waits.

“That plant, on the tour,” Brian continues, softly but with conviction, “I think it did something to me. I scratched my hand on it and ever since then, I’ve felt like this.”

Pat breathes out long and slow, taking a moment to gather his thoughts. “How much sleep are you getting?”

“Not a lot,” Brian confides. “Maybe four or five hours at most each night, all broken up.”

“Do you think,” he continues, gently trying to thread this needle, “you might be psyching yourself up because you’re tired?”

Lightning-fast, Brian looks up at him with a betrayal-struck face. “I’m not _hallucinating_, Patrick. I know how I feel!”

“I’m not saying you don’t,” Pat says, backing off, “I’m just not sure I follow. You think you’re allergic to whatever that plant was? Have you taken like, Benadryl or something?”

“This isn’t a fucking _allergy_, Pat!” Brian spits out with unexpected venom, ripping his hands back. “Something is wrong with me and I said I needed you to _trust me_.”

Talking with Brian generally feels particularly unscripted, but Pat’s never been so at a loss in their conversations before. “I don’t know what you’re asking me to trust,” he says, combing his hair back a little while he tries to reign in the frustration in his voice. “Please, just tell me what you think is going on.”

Brian digs the heels of his palms into his eyes and hunches over, rocking back and forth in a self-soothing motion.

Pat breathes deep, counts to ten, then scoots infinitesimally closer and tries to untense his body. He puts a hand on Brian’s shoulder, gentle at first to see if he’s shrugged off, then more of a solid weight. “I’m here for you, Bri. I just don’t know what’s going on. I need you to tell me, please. I’ll listen.”

Brian’s rocking turns into nodding and he slides out from under Pat’s hand, sinking to the floor and turning in toward Pat in one fluid motion. He wraps his arms around Pat’s waist and lays his head in Pat’s lap.

It’s unexpected, and briefly confusing, but Brian’s whole being is projecting vulnerability in a way that Pat can’t misinterpret. So Pat folds himself over Brian, keeping one hand anchored on his shoulder and letting the other move in a slow, steady strokes up and down his back.

“I feel _haunted_,” Brian confides, voice trembling like wresting those words from his body was exhausting.

There’s nothing good to say to that—well, no, there’s nothing _honest_ to say to that—so Pat thinks about it for a moment and settles on, “Okay.”

Things rest there for a while, Brian clinging tearless-scared to Pat, and Pat not pushing his skepticism any further.

“Stay the night?” Pat finally asks when his back begins to protest his hunched posture too loudly.

Brian nods, squeezes his waist tighter.

“Will you,” Pat starts, then pauses. “Just, to sleep tonight—will you take a Benadryl? I don’t have any, like, melatonin or Z-quil or whatever else.”

Brian sighs, but he nods again and doesn’t protest.

They watch something on Netflix in bed until Brian succumbs to the Benadryl and falls heavy into snore-sleeping. Of course it’s not until then that Pat realizes he hasn’t had dinner, _damn it_, didn’t make Brian eat dinner either. Hopefully the broth was filling.

So he’s out in the kitchen a while, first microwaving some leftover lasagna and then just absentmindedly petting Charles and scrolling through twitter. Everything will be back to normal in the morning after Brian’s got enough sleep to stop anxiously catastrophizing and dismissing more mundane explanations, he’s just got to wait it out.

He’s almost forgotten about all of the bizarre twists today had taken until he’s brushed his teeth and stripped down to his boxers and crawled quietly into his own bed—until Brian _thrashes_ suddenly and violently, his body straining in one tense bowed line.

Pat startles, then reaches out to jostle Brian by the shoulder, saying his name.

Brian doesn’t wake, though, just continues to strain and twitch and sound an occasional closed-mouth keening cry. When Pat touches his forehead, it’s burning.

Honestly, his primary concern right now is Brian’s well-being. But Pat can’t help but shake the curiosity… can’t help but be drawn to lifting the covers that Brian’s already kicked loose…

Pat is terror-trapped, the instinct to recoil unbidden by his frozen limbs. He can’t even twitch his eyes away, can’t so much as blink against this waking nightmare. It’s his fault. Could anything have turned him from unbelieving other than beholding these sighs himself? There, on Brian’s right arm, he can see the dark tendrils of a bone-deep bruise crawling timelapse-slow around toward the back of his elbow.

The Benadryl seems to have at least granted Brian a larger quantity of sleep, though Pat can’t speak to its quality

Well, not personally, anyway. He experienced it all as an outsider, sleepless and frightened. He twitched with every spell of thrashing while he panic-googled on his phone and eventually wore himself down to glancing up from his twenty-tabbed computer research to see if anything new was happening whenever Brian made a particularly pained sound.

The last few early morning hours are all calm, though. Brian’s no longer hot to the touch, and his bruise is—god, it’s _stationary_, that shouldn’t be a thought Pat has to have but there it is. He’s just about to twitch through the veil to the other side of _asleep_ when Brian stirs and Pat’s suddenly up and insomnia-alert.

“Hey,” Pat says, unable to restrain himself from pulling Brian back to wakefulness as well. “Hey, Brian, you awake?”

Brian groans and curls away from Pat, taking most of the covers with him.

“Bri, hey, are you okay? Drowsy?” He shakes Brian’s shoulder a bit, lays his cards out in a moment frayed honesty. “C’mon, you had some dreams last night, I need to talk to you.”

That, at least, gets Brian to pull himself through the last of the Benadryl-haze into a sobering wakefulness.

“Your arm—” Pat starts, but Brian’s already scrabbling out of the covers and twisting his arm to inspect it through squinting eyes. And even though he saw it earlier, saw it _happening_, it sends a thrum of panic through him when he sees the bruising skirting a path below Brian’s bicep.

“I _saw it_, Brian,” Pat says and, oh, god, he’s panicking again now that he’s not alone with his thoughts.

And, bless him, Brian reacts to these new horrors wrought on his body by reaching out and pulling Pat toward him and holding him still—god, when did he start shaking?—and rocking the two of them gently like a ship on restless seas.

“I’m sorry,” Pat chants in a panic-babble, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, I didn’t know, I saw it move, Brian, I’m so sorry—”

Brian just squeezes him tighter and whispers, “I’m just glad I’m not alone.”

“Why—I’m sorry, you shouldn’t be having to calm me down, _fuck_, Brian—”

“Shh,” he says and lurches in a suspiciously vulnerable way, “I’ve got a few days lead on dealing with this… Glad you’re on board now.”

He can’t tell if Brian _means_ for that to sting, but either way he deserves it. Hopefully if they get to the other side of this, he won’t decide to drop Pat for having been slow to trust.

_Not if. When. Don’t think if._

Pat shakes himself out of Brian’s grasp and scrubs his hands down his face beneath his glasses without finesse. He shouldn’t have done that, made Brian comfort him when he’s the one dealing with it. “Did you sleep at least? Like, you had nightmares, but do you feel like you slept more?”

“I slept more, yeah,” Brian nods, back to moving sleep-slow. “I feel really sore, though.”

“Yeah… it looked like you were having a rough time.”

“What about you? Were you up the entire time?”

“Mmhm,” Pat nods. “You kept having nightmares. I tried to research, but what the hell do you even look up? Hey Siri, search the web for, _My boyfriend touched a plant and now he has a weird bruise and maybe he’s possessed_.”

Brian flinches hard. “Do you think I’m possessed?!”

“No! I—I don’t know at all.” He reaches out and combs Brian’s soft hair back out of his face. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to… I have no idea, Bri, even after trying to research all night. Every time I thought I might have had something it was just some bullshit creepypasta or D&D home-brew monsters.”

“I was gonna go back to that… place,” Brian says. “From the ghost tour. I don’t even know the business hours yet. I think you might’ve even done more research than I did.”

“The main house is open Thursday through Sunday from 10am to 6pm,” Pat recites, surprising himself with how readily the information comes out. “The garden’s open ’til 7pm—except when it’s open for tour groups apparently. It’s called the Mallory House.”

A contemplative hum gives way to a pained groan as Brian tries to stretch through the sleep-aches in his body. “Alright, how about this,” he says, propping himself up on his side to lay out his plan. “I’m gonna call in sick, go home and get changed. I’ll shower, eat, all that good stuff. You’re gonna get, like, a _little_ sleep at least. Then, do you wanna meet at the Mallory House?”

“I could just go with you,” Pat offers, “or go ahead of you and get a start on research.”

Brian gives him a strange, soft smile, and plucks the glasses off Pat’s face to set them on the bedside table. “It’s hard to retain info after an all-nighter. Trust me. Just don’t sleep past when it’s closed and text me when you’re up.”

Pat sighs and relents, feeling the weight of sleep settling over himself heavier by the second now that he’s been given permission he didn’t know that he was waiting for. “You gonna be okay?”

It’s maybe the wrong question to be asking, but Brian stands and puts on his performer’s smile and says, “Heck yeah! Of course I am.”

“I’m sorry about last night,” Pat says again, once Brian’s dressed and zipping up his sweatshirt while he stands by the front door. Pat feels nervous and tired and acutely like he just really fucked up big time with that one.

“It’s okay,” Brian says again, seemingly brushing him off a bit in order to get out the door before Pat keels over. “Get some sleep.”

Pat nods and steps into his space, hugging Brian tight and not so much kissing his forehead as pressing his lips to it without varying pressure. Brian leans back just enough for a proper parting kiss and says he’ll see Pat soon, and then he’s out the door.

There’s no good reason for Pat to stand there by the door, listening to Brian’s footsteps down the hall. He feels peculiar and untethered to his body after being awake for—_God, it’s been over 24 hours now, hasn’t it_? Eventually he shakes himself free before his feet root into the entryway and he drifts back to his bed, barely remembering to call out of work before he’s chasing the smell of Brian’s hair on his pillows and hoping to wake up in a world that makes more sense.

Unfortunately the world still feels unreal when Pat wakes up five hours later, though it’s a new flavor of unreal at least. The angle of the light through his window feels _wrong_, and he’s still tired but possibly less so. He realizes with a sinking feeling that last night really did happen. This morning happened. And, today is going to happen.

He texts Brian that he’s awake, and stares into his fridge without an appetite. Brian answers almost immediately, suggests they meet at the Mallory House in an hour, then sends in rapid succession: the homepage for a nearby sandwich place, a very brief profile on Regis Mallory on a page that looks like it was made on Geocities, and a photo of Zuko with his eyes partly open in his sleep.

Pat rubs his eyes, and heats up a can of chili that he doesn’t want.

The page on the Mallory House doesn’t have much to go on. At least, not much more than he gleaned from the tour. An occultist, some rumors about what poisonous plants he grew, more rumors about bodies buried in the garden, absolutely nothing in the way of evidence or citations.

Searching on his phone doesn’t yield any different results from the ones he got on his computer last night, but he keeps combing the depths of Google search results pages until it’s time to cover the remaining half of his bowl of chili for the fridge and leave.

Even after last night, Pat’s reaction when he spots Brian leaned up against the gate is still a rush of fond excitement. It’s like his brain doesn’t have enough information to process the inscrutable horrors surrounding Brian, so his heart’s got free reign to just cry out _you came_!

When Brian glances up from his phone, he waves casually and smiles—and it’s almost like things are normal again. But Brian still looks tired in a vaguely ill way, and the smile doesn’t brighten his eyes as much as it ought to.

So Pat swallows his concern and stops right in front of Brian, leaning forward and bracing himself against the gate with one outstretched arm to loom over Brian. “What’s a nice guy like you doing at a place like this?”

“Gosh, I dunno if I should talk to you. I’m meeting my big strong boyfriend here and if he sees you talking to me, he might do wrestling to you.”

“Sounds like a strong and sexually talented guy. I’d better go before he kicks my ass without even trying.”

Brian stands up straighter and wraps his arms around Pat underneath his jacket. “Hey, Pat,” he says while bringing him quietly into his chest.

Pat hugs him with his free arm and _hey_s him back, still unused to public displays of affection even without many passers-by but willing to take a step outside of his comfort zone for Brian, who seems to have no such reservations.

“I got cash out for tickets into the main house. If you wanna get sandwiches after, we can call it even?” Brian says.

Pat nods, and they head in with Pat positioning himself between Brian and the pond. The burgundy plant looks even more peculiar in the daylight, but perhaps it’s just Brian’s theory about all of this being the plant’s fault that’s making him feel that way…

It’s not _not trusting Brian_ if he’s just trying to keep an open mind, right? You can’t just blindly listen to someone but—well, it’s _his_ body. Fuck.

The interior of the Mallory House is somewhere between Historical Site and Haunted Home, with roped off rooms arranged to depict Life As It Was, if that included an errant pentagram or abundance of candles.

A docent with a winding sigil embroidered on her collar finds them craning their necks around the barrier in the room of Regis Mallory’s desk space and mostly reiterates what they’ve already read on the sign in this room.

It’s an odd conversation to try and steer, but Pat thinks that Brian catches on to what he’s doing immediately. Pat thinks, _We’re drift compatible._

They casually steer the conversation to the garden and its plants and their general innocent curiosity and—oh gosh, was anyone really _buried there_? What kind of plants did Mallory grow, and is there any kind of garden layout reference? What a fascinating guy! Did he ever write a book? Did anyone write a book about him?

Somehow, they manage to glean a bit of new info. Rumor used to be that Mallory would abduct victims to make bone meal fertilizer for his garden, but over time the rumor changed to bodies buried in the soil. Most of the more noticeable plants are labeled but Mallory was a man with a prolific garden. There’s a book in the gift shop, if they’re interested, with more history and information on Regis Mallory and his garden and the rumors about him. It has some transcripts from his journal.

They go to the gift shop and Brian glares at the price tag so Pat forks over $30 for a too-thin book with some god-awful compressed photos and the text in Papyrus.

They pause in the garden once more to take photos of the burgundy plant, its lone flowering stalk rising from a nest of long blade-like leaves on the ground. Another docent approaches, the same winding sigil on his shirt collar, and he asks about their interest in the plant with an intrigued look in his eyes that sends chills down Pat’s spine. Brian asks the man if he knows what the plant is called, and the way he says, _“I don’t. Why, are you interested in a closer look?”_ has Pat wrapping an arm protectively around Brian’s shoulder and steering him away as soon as he’s cautiously extracted them from this conversation.

“We can’t go back there,” he murmurs once they’re down the street, and Brian nods and leans in closer to him.

After lunch they go straight to to the library. There are no branches specializing in scrolls and grimoires, and they don’t want to deal with the crowd at the Main Branch, so they hop the train to Brian’s preferred branch—”_Of course you have a preferred branch_,” Pat says as he messes up Brian’s hair. When they get there, Pat casually scrubs the metadata from one of the photo he took of the plant and posts it on r/whatsthisplant with a throwaway account.

After they claim two seats opposite each other on an otherwise unoccupied table, Pat dives back into the _shitty, overpriced_ Mallory book while Brian’s off combing the—god, Pat _still_ thinks the words ‘card catalogue’—the database.

When Brian’s back, he’s got an optimistic stack of books and a couple stubby golf pencils and scraps of paper for them to scribble down notes onto.

“Sorry, someone else has _The Lusty Argonian Maid_ checked out so we’re gonna have to do actual research,” Brian says, his eyes crinkled with joy at his own joke.

A long time passes before either of them has need to write down anything. Brian seems to spend only a few minutes on most of the books, just enough to confirm that he’s better off setting them aside than spending too much time on them. Pat keeps checking up on Reddit and finding no responses.

Then Pat finds a passage on illness observed in some visitors to Mallory’s garden.

There’s a scan on the next page from Mallory’s journal. It’s a bit of a struggle at first to read the small script in the—just, irresponsibly poor image quality, but there is some _information_.

Pat doesn’t say anything immediately. He reads it through a couple of times before quietly sliding out of his seat and walking around the table to take a seat beside Brian.

“I think this could be it,” he says in a library-hush. “He wrote that a new plant appeared near the rushes. Then a few days later, this section, he talks about handling it with gloves, ‘_after what happened to Joseph’_, so that’s… that’s something, right?”

“That _is_ something,” Brian murmurs in assent.

Pat nods and returns to reading renewed fervor.

“He called it the Riftvine,” Pat announces later with no further comment. “There’s another sentence I can’t figure out either, but it doesn’t seem related.”

“Didn’t look like a vine,” Brian says, but then he gasps and cringes away from the bruise climbing his arm like a trellis, and they both understand.

It’s a while before Pat stumbles upon anything worth mentioning again. “He was really into multidimensional stuff. Astral projection. This says he used to try to get himself fucked up making tea from different plants in his garden.” It feels like grasping at straws, but that’s really all he has for a handhold at this point.

Not long after that, Brian abandons his current stack of books and wanders off to search again.

Pat finishes skimming through the remainder of the Mallory book before Brian returns. He’ll read more closely later, but at a glance it was all irrelevant information about the preservation of the building and its registry as a historical site and the apparent dissolution of Mallory’s acolytes.

There are a handful of photos of the garden that show the plant scattered throughout the book. Its appearance is unchanging despite the passage of time.

Brian sets several books in front of Pat when he returns and they start their research anew.

The Riftvine seems to be the string that starts unravelling everything once they pull on it. Information still comes on slow, but it gains momentum in a way that’s exciting and inherently unsettling.

“This is talking about legends of plants growing out from other dimensions,” Brian says of one book while his eyes are still scanning back and forth over the page.

“Apparently some people claim to astral project with hallucinogens, so maybe a tea isn’t too far off,” Pat says, scribbling a few notes down.

He almost doesn’t hear the horror-hoarse whisper of his name escape Brian’s lips, but glances up to see the color drained from Brian’s face while he stares wide-eyed at the book before him.

Once more, Pat finds himself moving calmly despite the roar of blood in his ears and the fight-or-flight flutter of his heartbeat as he rounds the table once more. He scoots shoulder-to-shoulder with him and looking down at the book.

The illustration certainly has an uncanny resemblance to what they’d seen at the Mallory House. It’s maybe a little wider and more overgrown where whatever Brian touched was tall and manicured, and it’s a black and white drawing and not the near-unnatural deep red of the plant they’d seen, but it’s a match.

It’s not called the Riftvine here, though. This book calls it Bonechoke.

Pat doesn’t realize he’s rubbing his thumb back and forth across the plane of Brian’s shoulder until he’s already been doing it. Doesn’t know if it’s for Brian’s benefit or his own.

There’s a lot more information in here. Not a lot of it is… comforting…

_It might not even be the right plant. It might not even be the plant’s fault._

Pat shuts his eyes tight and remembers what he _saw_ and forces himself to keep reading.

Brian shuts the book suddenly and pushes his chair back to stand with a loud clatter amidst the quiet library. He mutters something about a few more books and asks Pat to take the rest to a cart for him. Pat doesn’t know yet whether he’s supposed to follow Brian or give him space, so he does as he’s told and feels sick about it.

Lightning-fast, Brian returns with a book on runes and symbols and another on scrimshaw and checks those out along with the book they’d just been reading, which Pat can now see is meant to be a compilation of eerie accounts of phenomena that can only be explained by the existence of parallel universes.

Somehow, Brian smiles and jokes casually with the librarian while Pat hovers near him trying to reconcile everything he has ever known to be true with the sight of a bruise alive-winding around Brian’s arm.

It would be so easy to write it off as a dream. Everything yesterday feels like a dream. Everything now feels like a dream. That’s what happens when you don’t sleep enough. Pat has to keep telling himself that he saw it, that it _happened._

They go back to Brian’s this time. As much as Pat wants to correct Laura and Jonah’s knowing smirks when Brian tells them he and Pat need to do research, he doesn’t know how to begin explaining the situation they’re in. It’s easier to play along, nod in sheepish agreement to keep it down, and shut themselves away as quickly as possible.

There are only a handful of responses to his Reddit post. A few attempts at identification, and many replies dismissing those identifications as wrong with no further suggestions.

Pat sits with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched comfortably across Brian’s bed while he reads over the information he got from the library again. It’s no less disturbing a second time through, but it’s also no less _believable_.

According to this… this single uncited book, the Riftvine roots interdimensionally in the skeletons of beings that touch it and leeches nutrients from them as it grows. 

“It does explain a few things,” Brian says when he glances at Pat’s book. “About the rumors. The bodies and stuff. They’re based in the truth.”

Swallowing back a comment about _truth_, Pat simply nods. God, he believed Brian earlier, so why is it so hard to now?

It hits him suddenly, and he flips back through the book on Regis Mallory. “He wrote that he fed the plant bone meal,” he says hoarsely, the previously illegible scrawling suddenly making sense.

There’s a quiet moment before Brian’s voice quavers and he says, “That tracks.”

“I don’t really understand the next part,” Pat says, going back to the other book. “It says you have to cut it off and carve wards in its primary dimension. It says you have to get there using the plant itself. That’s _nothing_.”

Brian bends off to the side to reach one of the books and his sleeve rides up on his arm, revealing the still-dark twisting bruise. “Since it roots in the bones, I think you’d have to carve the wards into them.” He waves the book on scrimshaw back and forth in Pat’s face. “This is mostly about carving patterns and designs and stuff into ivory and antlers, but the other book looked like it had a lot on symbolism—“

“You can’t _carve_ your _bones_, Brian!” Pat grips his hair with one hand and clenches the other empty against his thigh.

“I know that!” Brian snaps, glares at him with unsettled tension. “I’m not it’s goddamn _primary dimension_, Pat.”

“How do—what does that even mean?! How do we even know what that is?”

“I think—look, it’s…,” Brian deflates, “it’s a theory. It’s just what makes sense when you put all of this together.”

He looks shaken, like he’s barely holding it together and Pat’s going to be the one to tear him apart.

He looks—Pat can’t get it out of his head, the way he said it—_haunted_.

“What’ve you got,” he prompts, tired-gentle.

Brian drags himself over next to Pat and leans heavy on his shoulder while he points to the book. “It says that, _’only the ceremonial knife, identifiable by its pull toward victims, will be effective in locating roots and carving wards’_.”

This time Pat bites the inside of his cheek while he nods. _Ceremonial knife_. What is any of this? That’s not an _answer_.

“So… okay, we know Mallory was interested in astral projection. And that he experimented with plants he grew. So maybe you have to use the same plant, like it says, and that takes you to its _primary dimension_, and then you… use a special knife… to carve.”

He trails off, withdrawing from conversation like he’s forfeiting a battle. Pat puts an arm around him, and holds him tight, pressing his lips to Brian’s hair.

When did he get a headache? It feels like it’s been going for a while, now.

“Okay,” he says, still against Brian’s head. “So we need to find a knife. Then… steal some plant parts. Then you just take a trip into an alternate dimension and draw on your bones. Sound about right?”

Brian nods, shuddering through it.

“Okay. We can do that.” Pat forces confidence.

“I’m tired,” Brian says, and his words weigh heavier than a single night of sleep.

“Should I take one of the books home to research?”

Turning inward more, Brian presses himself hard against Pat’s chest while he shakes his head. “Please stay.”

“Oh, okay. Do you want me to go see if Laura made you dinner?” Pat agrees before even considering it, immediately thinking of all the logistical issues that hadn’t come to mind when he opened his mouth.

“No,” Brian says, already moving to crawl under the covers. “I feel so drained.”

It’s hard not to feel useless. Regardless of what Pat can or cannot believe or comprehend, Brian certainly looks like he’s suffering.

“You gonna brush your teeth?” Pat asks.

Brian just shakes his head weakly.

Pat heaves himself up with a sigh and says, “I’m gonna go pick up a toothbrush and some food. I’ll be back in a bit, okay?”

He spends what feels like the required amount of time in Brian’s living room explaining the situation insofar as Brian not feeling well and Pat staying over to Laura, and then some added small talk, before he steps out to buy a few things. Laura lets him take her keys so he won’t need to get buzzed in.

Pat texts his roommate about feeding Charlie on his way back up, eats quickly and quietly and alone standing awkwardly in the kitchen listening to the quiet bleed of music from under Jonah’s door, and then lets himself quietly back into Brian’s room once he’s ready to sleep.

“I’m sorry,” Brian whispers right after Pat’s settled in, and Pat jumps.

“Christ, I thought you were asleep!”

“Sorry,” Brian repeats. “Just got worried. You don’t have to… I know I’m a lot, right now. Not what you signed up for.”

Pat’s heart twists and he shimmies closer, runs a hand through Brian’s hair in a way he hopes comes across as comforting. “All I signed up for was you. And right now, this is you. We’ll take care of it.”

Brian sighs and shakes his head and curls up against Pat and doesn’t say anything else that night.

The sleep Pat does get is mostly due to carryover exhaustion. Brian twists and gasps and lurches awake throughout the night, each time panting and whining and sweating and shaking until he slips back into sleep for however long he’s granted respite. He murmurs sentence fragments about vines crushing him while pulling himself out from these dreams. Pat wakes with him, does his best to be soothing while still sleep-selfish, and returns to dreaming long before Brian each time.

When Pat awakens in the late morning, it’s to Brian’s unrestrained horror-wail and the sight of a bruise forking off across the seam of his shoulder.

Shit. They need to hurry.

It’s Friday, so Tara’s probably not surprised to get another couple of sick day emails from them.

“Where do you even get a ceremonial knife?” Brian asks with a hollow voice over a bowl of Cap’n Crunch.

“Probably…,” Pat begins, then winces. “Brian, we cannot fuckin’ steal it from a museum. What about… It said you’re drawn to it, right? What if we just… go to some pawn shops or antique stores? Or wherever you’re drawn to?”

“Okay, Simone,” Brian says with a smirk and this may be the first time in Pat’s like he’s felt _relieved_ to be sassed.

“No way. Simone would shower and wear a new shirt before going outside.”

“Oh, you don’t want to—“

“No, fuck it, I feel antsy. I wanna get this moving. Sorry if I reek even though I bought deodorant. God I am the grossest boyfriend, fuck.”

Brian smiles. A _real_ smile, one that reaches his eyes and does something to brighten even the dark circles under them. “I’ve had grosser.”

They find it in the second antique store.

Pat had, it turned out, been overly concerned with the _how will we know_ part of the equation.

After they split up to mosey around and casually look for knives, Brian found it almost immediately.

“Pat,” he said just loud enough to get his attention in the quiet shop. “It’s this one.”

It’s an unassuming thing. Small, but it doesn’t fold like a pocket knife. No fancy handle, no elaborate crossguard. Just some small pattern engraved along the spine. “Are you sure?”

Brian nods once, certain.

Pat bought the book, so Brian buys the knife. The shopkeeper wraps it in tissue paper until it’s several times its original size and tries to hand it to Brian, but when he makes no move toward it Pat takes over.

“I can’t hold it,” Brian says once they’re outside. It comes out of him like some innate knowledge that he has only just unlocked. And well… Pat accepts that.

They loop back around to Brian’s and he packs his library books and clothes to stay at Pat’s for the night. “If that’s okay,” he says all of a sudden. “I just… until it’s over, maybe? We keep not planning for—“

“Of course, no, you’re good,” Pat interrupts. Secretly, guiltily, he’d rather do this at his place. Fewer questions asked. He knows they’ll be together tonight. Charlie’s there.

“So you can’t hold it?” Pat asks apropos of nothing while they’re standing near the corner of their train car.

Brian shakes his head and sighs.

“So how are you gonna do the… carving,” he says, wincing from his visceral word choice.

It doesn’t take too much of Brian facing Pat remorsefully and shrinking back into himself for Pat to understand that _Brian_ will not be doing the carving.

“Oh. Okay.”

It’s easier to get things done when they split up research. Brian looks into astral projection while Pat goes through the rune book and begins to copy down relevant symbols and meanings to narrow down into the most effective options.

Charles is happy for the company, purring and walking between the two of them and laying atop Pat’s papers any time he leaves them unattended.

Pat orders them a pepperoni pizza for a late lunch and they barely look up from their research to eat.

“So you’ll need to hold the knife while touching my body, astral project with an herbal tea, get rid of the plant, carve some runes in my bones, and maybe try to hurry if you hear too much screaming on my end.”

“Piece of cake,” Pat mutters, then winces and adds more optimistically, “can’t be that difficult if we figured it all out.”

“How do you feel about trespassing?” Brian asks suddenly.

“Depends pretty heavily on the context.”

“We need… leaves, or roots, or something.”

“Right. We can’t just walk in and get them.”

Brian shakes his head. “Definitely not. Not without people noticing. We need to wear gloves.”

“Is this… we, or _me_?” Pat asks.

There’s a thoughtful hum from Brian before Pat surprises himself by continuing, “You know what, I can do it. It’s fine. I’ve played Metal Gear Solid.”

“Have you ever committed a crime in your life?” Brian asks, smirking at him.

“Baby, you wouldn’t have _believed_ my Kazaa library.”

So, in spite of the bravado, Pat is pretty fucking nervous. He’s also pretty fucking suspicious, dressed in all these dark clothes and lurking outside a closed gate. Fuck.

_This is just what people wear, just be goth, you’re fine_.

He’s got gloves, but they’re… well, yellow dish gloves. There wasn’t anywhere nearby to get gardening gloves. And he’s got the knife…

And now he’s just got to hop the gate here and hope there aren’t any tours coming by or evening ritual sacrifices before he’s done.

He’s tall, at least, and retains enough athleticism that even though he can’t jump stupid high like Brian, he can vault himself over the gate pretty smoothly and land without fucking up his ankles or anything. Of course, once he’s on the other side he feels even more acutely afraid of getting caught.

Even in the dark, it’s easy to find what he’s looking for. “So you’re the Riftvine,” Pat murmurs to the weird little stalk while he tugs on his conspicuous dish gloves.

He crouches down and cuts off one of its long scraggly leaves near the base, puts it carefully into a baggie. Nothing seems to be oozing out from the cut he made, at least.

That… should be good, right? This thing has no periphery flowers, and someone will definitely notice if its one stalk is beheaded.

But he’s curious. This thing’s supposed to root in other dimensions, right? That’s what the stories say. So he kneels down and feels underneath the plant, right in the water’s edge.

He’s feeling around blindly for a minute—even his hand is touch-blind, in a way, with the glove on— before he feels a root. He tugs carefully, trying to loose it from the dirt instead of break it where he’s holding on.

It feels _wrong_, but that’s probably just the glove. He’s never had to deal with roots while wearing dish gloves. Definitely not aquatic roots. They’re probably supposed to feel too-smooth and knobby-textured in a way that makes Pat’s stomach drop.

It’s just nerves, it’s just trespassing—that’s why he feels nauseated.

Pat realizes he’s been looking away and turns suddenly to face the water as he pulls enough root up to bring it to the surface.

It’s a vague thing with an almost static blur to it, as though Pat’s glasses have a root-shaped cutout in them. It’s too dark to detect color, but setting his eyes upon it fills Pat with an unnatural sense of dread.

Part of him knows that it’s because he has been telling himself that this is the reason for Brian’s strange affliction. Part of him remembers, sudden-vivid, Brian using the phrase _a feeling of impending doom_.

He steels his nerves and holds his breath and grips the knife tight in the wrong hand to make two quick, clean cuts and separate a chunk of root.

It… plants can’t make sounds. It can’t scream. It doesn’t make a sound. Not water-muffled screeches, not bag-dampened hissing.

Pat tells himself this and shakes any other impression from his mind as he hurries back to the sidewalk, quite forgetting his stealth mission.

“You’re supposed to stay in contact with me in order for it to work,” Brian says, catching Pat up on the research he did during their time apart.

“Ok, I’ll hold your hand while I’m out,” Pat says, forced-casual.

“It’s supposed to hurt a lot,” Brian says, dropping his gaze to where he’s nervous-tracing the paths of Pat’s veins. “I might move too much.”

“Do you have an idea?”

“I need to not move,” Brian murmurs, “so I was thinking I could go buy some ropes.”

The way he lifts his head and meets Pat’s eyes with as close to a salacious expression as he can muster—when he’s so exhausted and threatened—is stomach-churning.

“I have some,” Pat responds, quiet.

“Oh.” Brian breathes, reframing some part of himself around this information. “Okay.”

There were some conflicting answers about scents, but more sources said sandalwood was the best choice for astral projection. It’s tricky though, since they immediately have to rule out either candles or incense, because an open flame—

Luckily, Laura was willing to let Brian borrow her wax warmer without asking any tricky questions. They even found sandalwood wax melts at the first store they tried. So that’s set up and Pat can smell it from the hall, wood-smooth, and it works with how warm the room is, since—

He’s drawn a bath with the hottest water he can get, ignoring instructed portions and pouring an entire bag of epsom salts into it. There’s no knowing how long this will take, though, so Pat clumsily covers the top of the bathtub in plastic wrap and weighs it down with bottles when it won’t stick. It’ll be part ceremony, part practicality, and probably part relief for Brian, since he’s—

Pat plucks the kettle from the stovetop the moment it begins to shriek and pours it over the Riftvine clippings. They’re undried, for fear of unleashing some evil essence into his oven or microwave or home in general. He hasn’t thought too hard about unleashing that essence within his _body_, apparently, and he carries the mug carefully back to his room, shutting the door fast behind himself and feeling his heart lurch at—

Brian’s sitting propped up on his elbows, weary and unhiding, his legs kept spread by the pull of the ropes fixed around his ankles tethering him to the bed frame. He smiles at Pat. The contrast of the gentle expression on his face and the cruel branching bruise spread across his chest and back is—

It’s nauseating. It’s like a monkey’s paw vision of a wish Pat hadn’t even made.

The atmosphere has shifted into _uncomfortable_, pushed them enough steps ahead of their timeline to have unbalanced them without tipping their relationship fully past the point where this is unsurvivable.

Pat checks the tightness of the ropes around his ankles, dutifully quiet, and then moves around to work on his wrists.

He doesn’t realize that he’s making Brian nervous until the tremors work their way down to Brian’s hands from his epicenter.

“Don’t forget, my safeword is _violet_,” Brian says, too tremulous to land the teasing tone he so clearly aimed for.

Telegraphing his motions thoroughly, skimming his hand along the crisp new bedsheets, Pat cups Brian’s cheek apology-soft and leans his forehead onto Brian’s. He sighs, and tries to find words strong enough to lift a weight this heavy.

“I’m going to help you,” Pat says, determined.

“I know you are, Pat Gill,” Brian answers, voice panic-pitched.

Pat continues working in silence, his deft fingers moving in false-proficient practice. He’d practiced this morning, made sure he’d be able to move quickly and confidently to keep his or Brian’s nerves from fraying and slipping through his sweaty fingertips.

He stands back and pushes his hair out of his face and takes in the sight of Brian, splayed and vulnerable and consumed, quivering with cold and nerves.

“I’m sorry,” Pat whispers, setting his glasses down on the nightstand beside Brian’s.

“It’s okay,” Brian says. “You have to.”

“I’m going to help you,” Pat repeats. He places the knife down on the bed, handle toward Brian. “Are you… comfortable is the wrong word…”

Brian laughs terror-high and says, “It’ll be fine. I can’t—can’t get loose.”

“We should make sure,” Pat murmurs, and moves his long limbs easily, carefully, to straddle his legs over Brian’s waist, face down in ashamed determination.

With all the energy he has, Brian wriggles and writhes and does nothing to unseat Pat’s dead weight over him.

“I’ll take care of you,” Pat promises, trying to bore his determination into Brian’s eyes through his gaze. “I’ll be careful. I can feel you, if it—if I hurt you. I can hear you.”

“I know,” Brian says, then cringes at some foreshadowed pain. “It’s probably going to hurt no matter how you do it, but everything else hurts too. Please… just make it end.”

Pat swallows past the impossible tightness of his throat. “I’m going to.”

He leans forward and kisses Brian so gently, treating him as precious and fragile as he can knowing Brian can’t push back. He grabs his mug off the nightstand, then sits back up.

It must be a wretched picture, Pat looming tall and clothed over Brian, bruised and bound and bare but for Pat’s spare flannel pajama pants. Brian, horrified and haunted and harrowed, too much of his sleep and his well-being robbed from him to fight his demons. Pat, deceptively blank-faced, unconveying his regrets and fears and concerns, holding the knife safely point-out but holding it nonetheless.

“Didn’t expect you to introduce knife play so quickly, Pat Gill,” Brian says, ever attempting to alchemize tension into a bit. His coy look drops immediately, seeing the way Pat winces against anything analogous to an accusation.

In the silence and sandalwood, Pat steels himself for the next step.

“Give ‘em hell,” Brian says, and the forced-confidence he puts on for Pat gives him the push he needs to move off this proverbial ledge.

Pat takes a sip of the tea and sets it down again quickly before the taste hits, bitter and vile enough that even though its flavor is faint, he cringes at the taste of it spreading somehow past his tongue and down his throat and down, down, down into his belly and he tips his head back to work through swallowing the last of it and then he is gone.

Living in the city, it’s easy to imagine that out in the wilderness, away from all lights, it is sensory-deprivation dark. Pat’s been in the woods though, out in Maine, far enough away to know that even on a moonless night, the stars shine brightly enough to reveal the eerie shadow-shapes all around.

It’s difficult to find true darkness with enough space to really feel detached by it. Shutting the door in a windowless apartment bathroom will get you the darkness, but the familiar cluttered countertop is right where it’s always been.

Pat did an escape room once with a few friends. One of them booked the room, picked the one where the gimmick was that it was pitch black. They were all a little tipsy, feeling the walls with their eyes uselessly opened wide and inadvertently groping and smacking into one another. The unknown darkness of the center of the room was a unique unmooring that Pat had not experienced before.

He feels it again now. Pat widens his eyes uselessly, straining to focus into a nothingness so vast it feels tangible. When he looks down, he can see his arms and hands and the clever gleam of the knife, but as soon as he looks away it’s as though he forgets them entirely.

Though this place appears and _feels_ lightless, he can also see sparse specks flickering like static everywhere he turns.

Pat takes a step forward and his stomach lurches at the feeling of stepping off the edge of a cliff. There is infinite nothingness below him, and yet his foot falls upon some unknown, unsolid surface.

Reaching out his empty hand, Pat gropes blindly about in the darkness. He opens his mouth to speak, but this is an airless place.

Brian’s been right about everything else so far—about believing in these impossibilities—so he lays his trust in the knife, holds it outward and feels for where it tugs him, stumble-stepping into the abyss.

With no visible landmarks, it’s impossible to tell how far Pat has to go before the knife strikes a solid object and he feels the jarring and disorienting sensation of Brian, somewhere below his flesh, pain-spasming.

Carefully, Pat reaches his empty hand out and lays the flat of his palm against Brian’s breastbone, and he can comprehend the sight of where he touches and a halo around that point. He doesn’t need to see more than that. He can guide to the rest of Brian’s body from this point.

_No_. Pat shakes his head at himself. Brian’s body is elsewhere. _Pat’s_ body is elsewhere. These are just, Brian’s—just a part of him.

Pat moves his hand over to feel the bones caging over his elsewhere-heart when instead he meets a foreign growth and lurches back from its sickly warmth.

He retches silently into the nothingness and nothing comes from him because Pat is not _here_.

But something else _is._

Steeling his nerves, Pat lays his empty hand flat against Brian’s sternum again and brings the knife up in a white-knuckled grip to flay the foreign plant-flesh from Brian’s bones.

It shrieks and hisses and recoils from the blade, driven back irrevocably wherever they touch. Brian twitches below him, but does not sound or shake as Pat shears swathes of hideous roots from him. They wail inhuman screams that fray Pat’s already-tenuous grasp on reality as they fall, squelching, somewhere into the nothingness.

Pat leads with the knife and follows with agile fingers, wiping the bones to free them from all traces of overgrowth. Feeling the shape behind the specter of this violation against Brian’s humanity fills Pat, in at least one dimension, with a focused rage.

There’s no way to know how many eternities pass before Pat is kneeling at Brian’s feet, eyes narrowed and soft as he turns Brian’s hand over in his, feeling and seeing for any remaining traces in the crevasses of all of the delicate bones that let his ever-agile fingers alight, tremulous and unstill and speaking ahead of his mouth.

A handful of weeks ago the thought of just holding Brian’s hand was thrilling. Medium-risk, high-reward. He’d reached out on the crowded train and Brian had reached back and something so simple had been so _nice_. Still does. Everything with Brian feels nice.

This is the least Pat can do for him. 

If a trace of the Riftvine remains, Pat will see to it that it withers and dies where it rests. He presses Brian’s hand into his face, curls the jumble of bones making up the heel of Brian’s palm against his lips in apology, and then pulls his arm straight to inspect the flatter plane of the thicker thumb-side bone of his forearm.

For a moment, Pat just rests the knife against the surface of Brian’s arm. His sight-world has narrowed to this point. Presently, this is his purpose.

Pat cuts in, and Brian _screams_.

He can feel him now, lashing and choking down his shock, but those sensations and sounds are distant and detached and worlds away. All he can do is work quickly.

It’s tough to figure out what works best—Continuous moderate pressure, etching with harsh staccato bursts, laying over the same line lightly enough times to carve a distinct path—when everything makes Brian lurch and bow and howl somewhere unreassurable.

The first symbol is done, long and narrow, a line of protection and purification.

It makes the most sense to complete them all before inking.

He had thought, briefly, that it might be to Brian’s benefit to add more runes while he’s here. Give him some power-ups. He can barely give Brian the base protection he needs, though, the thrashing and sobs grating his nerves.

Brian hadn’t wanted involvement in this process, had shuddered to think of what might end up where. Perhaps he regrets that now, not knowing when this torture-salvation will end.

Another rune up his forearm on the other bone. A symbol down his humerus. Delicate spell-shapes across his clavicle. An etching of a pictogram on his scapula.

And flailing, writhing, floundering, wailing, screaming, _screaming_.

Even with the knife drawn back and Pat’s empty hand merely anchored against his unmarked side, he can feel the distant aftershocks of pain-spasms.

On TV, whenever someone sheds blood for a spell, they always slice their hand. Pat doesn’t know if the injuries to himself carry over or not, but decides not to be foolish with this and slices shallow on his thigh through his clothes before he can think himself into a stalemate.

The blood wells up fast and he winces against the pressure of dabbing it on his hand like a paintbrush and filling up all of his spells and runes and prayers and charms with himself.

No matter what happens, if everything goes sour and wretched, spoiled by exposure to this horror too early together, a part of Pat will always be protecting Brian. It’s horrifying, intoxicating, terrible, powerful, tender.

In this senseless place, this impossible world that is also his own, Pat has etched into Brian’s bones and stained them with his blood and feels vulnerable for doing so when Brian is the one still trembling and wailing out there in the flesh.

Pat reapplies his blood and runs the meat of his thumb over and over every line until he’s sure that they’re all filled and full of a life force. Until they all stand out against the stark bone white.

He stands behind Brian, finishing the last of the scapula-inking, and then tips his head forward until he’s leaning his forehead against the top knob of Brian’s spine. He cannot breathe, but tries to untense his body even as he can feel the steady flow of blood still creeping down his thigh. He runs his empty hand down Brian’s spine, feeling his fingertips trip down the notches like stair steps and, somewhere, Brian _shivers_.

It’s hard to know for sure if it was a soothed shiver. Pat waits a moment, then wraps his free arm around Brian’s front and strokes across his unaltered collarbone with a gentle caress.

The tension beneath elsewhere-Pat sighs away the slightest bit, and somewhere he hears a hum.

Having wrought such trauma against this body, even to rid it of a worse one, it seems only fair to try and restore some sense of right-feeling to it.

Pat runs his splayed fingers across Brian’s ribcage, slotting them in the spaces between the bars and holding firm and fast in a macabre embrace. He’s never thought about it before, how with one hand he can cover nearly the whole plane of one front-side, fingertips curving around toward the back.

Somewhere, Brian hums into the warm pressure of being so thoroughly held.

Sliding his fingers along down the slope of the delicate ribs to the smooth slide of cartilage to Brian’s firm breastbone to down along the curve down the plunging sweep outlining the whole structure that sends Pat’s stomach dipping down with it, feeling a shiver from the body below him.

Tentative, already having trespassed so thoroughly, Pat skirts his fingertips around and inside Brian’s ribcage, featherlight touches with fingers ready to fly away at the first sign of distress. He creeps them upward, climbing up the bars, shuddering in awe of the intimacy of this space.

He feels and hears and knows the whisper of his name on another’s lips.

The whole of his hand presses flat against the inside of Brian’s ribs and he feels more tension slip away below his body with a hiss of breath.

Cautiously, Pat lets his free hand slide back outside and skirt around to Brian’s back while he brings himself around to Brian’s front. He wants to speak, wants to ask how Brian feels and if he’s okay and to say how sorry he is for not believing him, for wasting time when they could have been stopping this sooner. Silently, he shifts the purpose of his whole being to touching Brian with the unrestrained adoration he’s kept leashed. 

He bends his head and rests his lips on Brian’s collarbone, the one he hasn’t carved and bloodied. Gently, he drags them along the slope and rests at the notch where it ends, waiting for feedback.

In the stillness bridging this place and all others, he feels a sea change below him, hears the sigh of Brian’s breathing shift in tone.

It’s entirely unnecessary, closing his eyes against this unfathomable darkness, but Pat lets them flutter shut and brings his other hand to the peak of Brian’s hip, hooking his thumb inside it while holding the handle of the knife against the outside. He moves to the dip in Brian’s clavicles and kisses him as a lover.

At the distant sound of a hitch in breath he’s still learning how to draw out, he moves cautiously up over toward where he has made a wreck of Brian in an effort to save him. He can feel the slide of his own blood against his lips as he drags them with agonizing care up to the peak of Brian’s shoulder.

He lavishes attention over the carved bone, trying to kiss it better, to overwrite the harm he has caused. An expanse of time and space away, Brian urges him on with pleas spilling soft off his tongue.

Pat turns again to face Brian’s back, mouthing wordless prayers and praises into his scored scapula. His own blood slips past his lips untasted as he moves to cover the expanse of it in unspoken apologies, leaning in close so that the flutter of his eyelashes brushes the bone.

His knife hand is still on Brian’s hip, resting on the outside of it now, thumb tracing the crest of it intimately for lack of the thin stretch of skin softening its sharp edges. Somewhere, Brian writhes into this particular touch.

There’s still a tension in Brian, he can feel the thrum of it below everything else. There’s still pain in him from the horror film torment done to his body. Anything Pat can do to drive that pain out from Brian’s mind becomes his sole purpose, his entire body ceasing to exist when he closes his eyes and feels only the parts of him that are touching Brian in this place and another.

With his empty hand Pat reaches underneath Brian’s other shoulder blade, just touching his fingertips to it, knuckles grazing the ribs behind them, and softly kisses the smooth plane of it on the other side. He turns his face, nuzzling and caressing his cheek and temple against it, flattening his fingers to sandwich the bone between them and hold steady to the one solid point anchoring him in this world.

Impossibly far away, he can hear his name louder on Brian’s lips, the cadence and length changing like he’s working out how to use Pat’s name as a spell.

Mouthing against the ridge jutting out of the scapula, he drops his free hand to Brian’s other hip, traces both thumbs in unison along the arch of the bones. The Brian below him bows his back in a high arch and wordless-wails in a confusion of pleasure-pain.

Pat falls to his knees, doesn’t feel them truly _land_, simply sinks and stops and holds his face to the outside of Brian’s hip and kisses it gentle all along the sharp jut of it that he adores. Brian is near-still now, submitting himself to feeling so much in such intimate spaces with only aftershock spasms and quiet gasps.

With closed eyes Pat presses one final kiss against the pebbles of Brian’s wrist, then he drops the knife soundlessly and pitches forward, following it into the void.

Pat pitches forward and falls thudding and open-eyed onto Brian’s heaving chest. All of the sounds and smells and tastes and sights and touches Pat has ever experienced flood into him at once, leaving him ragged and trapped within the tremors of his own body. The knife is gone.

With time, and closed eyes, Pat can eventually place himself again. The smell of sandalwood and sweat and Brian in his bedroom. The sound of their slowing breaths. The feeling of his sweat-through shirt clinging cold to his back but warm between their bellies.

“Are you okay?” Pat asks, voice coming out in a croak.

“Yeah,” Brian says, an exhaled whisper. He takes some time to catch his breath before he can manage to ask, “You?”

“Yeah,” Pat says, though it comes out strained.

Cringing against the motion, he pushes himself up enough to reach the scissors on his bedside table and gathers the strength to cut through the rope nearest to his hand, then the next one, trying not to smother Brian while also laying mostly on his face.

Between their shaking fingers, they manage to unwind the ropes around Brian’s wrists. Pat rubs at the indentations left behind, places his lips to one of the wrists and holds it still while he exhales apologies like a balm into it.

It takes some time before he notices Brian’s other hand in his hair, stroking shaking lines from the crown of his head to as far down his back as he can reach. It’s sobering enough to get Pat climbing off the bed.

Brian has suffered enough already, Pat can set aside his rattled nerves long enough to get him the care he deserves.

He cuts through the ankle ropes as well, favoring the speed of scissors, and removes them from Brian before massaging the marks there as well.

“D’you think you can walk?” Pat asks, and it comes out as more of a voice this time.

Brian hums contemplatively and eases himself to sitting on the edge of the bed. “Can you give me a hand?”

“Of course,” Pat says, and grits his teeth and forces stillness into his shaking body while he wraps an arm around Brian’s waist and guides him just down the hall and into the bathroom.

The laughter that slips out from Brian when Pat has to peel the plastic wrap off the top of the tub is surprisingly refreshing. It’s the first sign that things are possibly _okay_. No more cults and rituals and hauntings and wards… just Brian and the way his laugh makes Pat’s heart flutter.

“They didn’t have anything unscented,” Pat explains while holding Brian’s arm steady as he steps into the tub. “Chamomile seemed like the most neutral option, though. And it’s supposed to be, uh… _comforting and calming_, apparently.”

The plastic wrap seems to have done its job, as Brian hisses and eases himself into the hot water before shimmying into some semblance of comfort.

Pat wishes he could get in too, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a cramped apartment bathtub. It’s scarcely big enough for Brian, who has to choose between having his shoulders or knees submerged at any given time. Right now, he’s opted for the former and sunk down so low that his lips are below the water as well. The breath from his nose sends light ripples outward.

“Can I wash your hair?” Pat asks, suddenly adrift for lack of usefulness.

Brian nods, and Pat grabs some of the Nice Shampoo. It’s probably not as good as whatever Brian uses, and he won’t smell right—fuck, the salt in the water’s probably not good, either—but hopefully he’ll feel cleaner than he does now with his hair sweat-soaked.

After getting Brian to dip his head back into the water, Pat works up a slow lather, massaging Brian’s scalp all the while. He gently guides his head back again, tipping his chin up and scooping warm water to rinse at his hairline. He adds conditioner and scrubs at him again and pushes away the desire for reciprocation screaming from within.

Quietly, naturally, Pat segues into washing Brian bit by bit. He lifts his hands from the water one at a time and soaps them gently before placing them back in the warm bath. He can only really wash the extremities with any efficiency, but Brian shifts and sits up and Pat washes his back reverently, pausing to admire the curves of his shoulders with a new, profound appreciation. He washes Brian’s chest and lets his hand rest where he can feel the beat of Brian’s heart.

“I feel better,” Brian murmurs apropos of nothing.

“Do you… can you... tell?” Pat can’t figure out how to make his question more coherent.

“Maybe. I feel… lighter.”

Pat heaves a sigh of relief, even if it might be a bit premature, and lets his body sag until his face hits the water, glasses and all. He breathes out a comical stream of bubbles, delighting in hearing Brian’s water-muffled laughter.

“You get in here too,” Brian says once Pat’s lifted his face and fully regretted the decision he’s made.

“There’s no room,” Pat says, letting his dripping hair hang in a curtain around his face. He has no exit strategy for the wet fence he’s put up around his face. This was poor planning.

“There can be.”

“It’s supposed to be like, purifying, though. For you.”

“Pat, you were _in it_.” Brian puts weight in his words, and Pat shivers under his sweat-cold shirt. “And I want you here. Purify with me. Please.”

Pat sighs and cringes against the wet hair on his face when he stands up and undresses without preamble, knuckle brushing past a fresh cut on his thigh, setting his glasses aside to wipe down later. He hesitates, too exhausted to either feel properly ashamed of how exposed he is or figure out how to slot his body into an already too-full space.

Brian holds his arms open wide, answering the skeptical slant of Pat’s brow with a more insistent raise of his own. “I just made you touch my _bones_, Pat. Come tell me about how beautiful I am on the inside.”

There is _not_ enough room. There’s no getting around that. But Pat steps _carefully_ into the space between Brian’s legs and sits awkwardly in his lap and is just too bony and tall and his legs are too long and his hips are barely even in the water and—

Brian makes a cage of his arms around Pat’s middle and holds him as close as he can in their dimension. The bruises on his arm look lighter. Pat slouches down and hisses as the salt hits his cut thigh and then melts back against Brian.

He slowly makes himself small, compressing into the smallest Pat he can be under the weight of the incomprehensible things he has seen and done. The more he relaxes, the more they slither out from his memories, no more vivid than a half-forgotten dream.

Tears are slipping from his eyes, streaming to the water without fanfare. Cleansing his face in their salt, Pat supposes. 

They recover in close silence until their limbs are prickling too uncomfortably with pins and needles to ignore the impracticality of being two adult men in a small tub.

Pat uses the Good Towel on Brian, drying him thoroughly before blotting at himself half-heartedly. He roots around in the medicine cabinet until he can find antibiotic ointment and a single large bandage. 

“Let me,” Brian says when Pat’s sat down on the closed toilet lid and bent down toward his leg.

How Brian can treat him with such tenderness, how he can feed that guilty craving in his heart, Pat may never know. Brian’s thorough without being clinically distant, just carefully attuned to the needs and wants of the human body.

Pat scarcely remembers to turn off the wax warmer and grab a heavy quilt before they fall back into bed unclothed, still radiating heat and chamomile from the bath.

“Thank you,” Brian says, toying shyly with the hair at the nape of Pat’s neck. “For doing that with me. Not ditching me. Sorry, I really put you through a lot, huh?”

Something about that strikes Pat strangely, and it takes him a moment of hemming and hawing to tease it out from the adrenaline crash. Brian sees what happened tonight as something they endured together, not some private hell Pat put him through. The rational part of him, the one that knows what he’s seen is real, knows that Brian’s got it right and that he needs to reach out and take his metaphorical hand on this one instead of swan-diving into self-flagellation.

“You’re worth it,” Pat says in an exhale, releasing the holds he had placed on his affection. He runs his worshipful hands over the smooth expanses of Brian’s body without objective. “You’re incredible. I can't get close enough to you. Every part of you is amazing,” he whispers as Brian shivers into the touches ghosting over places Pat has touched much closer in this lifetime.

They pull each other into a fierce embrace, as though trying to hug deeper than the close press of skin everywhere they meet. Brian holds fast and trauma-bound, quiet and warm, carefully etching his affection deep into Pat’s heart.


End file.
